Converting Your Leads
A lot of search engine marketing is initially spent on building traffic. We call this “click marketing”. When we match this to the business goals of a client, this alone does not go far enough. In order to ensure that your search engine marketing is successful, you cannot ignore what is happening once the searcher arrives on a web site. Is the site persuasive?, have a clear call to action?, what’s the bounce rate like?, simple navigation? - these are all “post click marketing” issues.
A recent study by Omniture and InsideSales.com suggests that many companies are falling at the third hurdle - lead conversion or sales).
In this study, they made online enquiries from around 700 different companies. They set up a dedicated email address and phone number and monitored the results - and the results were quite shocking:
- Average email response time: 19 hours, 31 minutes (the optimum response time should be within the first hour)
- Average phone response time: 36 hours, 57 minutes (the optimum phone response time should be within the first five minutes)
- How many companies even responded? (only 47.3 percent responded via email, and just 7.5 percent responded via phone!)
We have also worked with clients who complained about the onversion of their search marketing, only to find that they had problems with their mechanism for receiving leads. In some cases, the enquiry form was broken - it never sent a lead through to the client. We also ask clients to look at their junk email folder - and they usually find a small gold mine in there.
We even had one client that had a newsletter signup form on their home page. When we asked to see their newsletter, they looked bemused and said there wasn’t one. So where we the leads from the newsletter signup. Then we checked and found that the form was broken. Nobody could signup!
So getting search marketing right is important. Getting visitors (click marketing) and converting those visitors into leads (post-click marketing).But don’t let your conversion processes let you down. Make sure that your enquiry form / order form is working and that any emails being generated are not being dumped into your junk email folder. But most importantly, follow up on sales leads. at least by email, but a phone call can sometimes be better.
This is what internet consulting companies like Emagin do. We transform the clients web site from an electronic brochure into a trackable and measurable sales channel.
Technorati Tags: SEM, search engine marketing, emagin, web analytics, web site optimization, landing page optimization